Dr. Mary Gallant, Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rowan University, was recently selected for the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award for the Year 2020 by the International Association of Top Professionals (IAOTP) for her influence, proficiency and dedication to her professional life.
Inclusion with the International Association of Top Professionals is an honor in itself, only a few members are selected for the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. These special honorees are distinguished based on their longevity in their career, contributions made to society and the impact they had on their industries. Dr. Gallant will be honored at IAOTP’s 2020 Annual Awards Gala being held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City at the end of this year for her selection as a Lifetime Achievement recipient. www.iaotp.com/award-gala
Dr. Gallant is being recognized for this honor for dedicating close to 30 years of her life’s work as an accomplished Associate Professor of Sociology. She demonstrated success as a member of the traditional full-time faculty at Rowan University and also in every role she has served.
Her key areas of expertise include teaching Classical Social Theory, a core course for Juniors and Seniors in the Sociology major and its BA in Sociology, both under the College of Liberal Arts and Science (CLAS) and the new College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) at Rowan University.
Teaching university students had been deeply meaningful for Dr. Gallant. She most often teaches core courses in classical social theory as well as senior seminars, but has also taught specialist topics courses. Between 1997 and 2004, she developed and taught, “Sociology of the Holocaust” (08399) for Sociology and the Sociology Coordinate major then with the Department of Education on campus. From 2009 onwards, she developed and taught a senior seminar course titled, “Sociological Imagination” (08428) for the Sociology Sequence A for Liberal Studies/Humanities and Social Science (LS/HSS). All these courses were in high demand.
As a researcher, her interviews with Holocaust survivors was well received. Dr. Gallant’s first book, Coming of Age in the Holocaust: The Last Survivors Remember (2002), is based on grants-funded, primary research. Using data from in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors, she observed that there were certain symbolic processes critical to surviving destruction of self and identity during persecution and oppression that survivors engaged right at the start of the oppression they endured. This led her to suggest that identity formation processes might be very relevant to surviving extremity and going on to full recovery. Her second book, Friendship Networks in Medical School; A Network Analytic Approach to the Study of Social Solidarity (2013) emerged from her PhD. Dissertation and has been on the US market since 2018. It examines the informal social processes shaping medical students learning and experience during training as they contend with the stress and uncertainty of belonging in a highly demanding profession. She is presently expanding both research projects.
Dr. Gallant in a special way deeply values her academic achievements connected with Holocaust research. In 1994, she presented a paper at the World Conference of Holocaust Scholars and Survivors, Errinerung und die Zukunft II, held in Berlin, GDR. Her paper was titled, “Children and Adolescents in the Holocaust: Effects of Trauma.” Thousands of people from all over the world attended the colloquium that took place in Germany, London and Oxford. She also has a book chapter on rescue that grew out of a separate presentation she gave at this World Conference that is now published in a three-volume work out of Palgrave titled, Remembering for the Future; The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, edited by John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell.
Her most recent chapter on the Holocaust is on the rescue of ten thousand Jewish children brought from Germany and its territories to the United Kingdom just before WWII. The book chapter is titled, “The Kindertransport: Gender and the Rescue of Jewish Children” in Different Horrors, Same Hell; Gender and the Holocaust (2013), edited and introduced by Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro, University of Washington Press.
Within an impressive repertoire of service roles at Rowan University, Dr. Gallant regards as most fulfilling that of being Department of Chair for Sociology for a short seven years between 2007 and summer 2015. During that time, as CLAS at Rowan University became CHSS, the number of students in the traditional major grew along with its curricular base. Under CHSS, working with colleagues eager to benefit the new college and its interdisciplinary mission, she was instrumental in advancing a new interdisciplinary curricular base for Sociology (announced in her PowerPoint presentation representing Sociology during the Provost’s Spring Lecture, 2013). This base provided the start for new programs and curriculum of different kinds that now align Sociology with Medicine and other divisions and programs across the whole of Rowan University.
No small tribute to the continuing success of the new Department of Sociology and Anthropology today was her mastering the organizational and interpersonal elements of incorporating the Anthropology faculty coming to them in 2012 from another field within CHSS. At the start, the Anthropology faculty formed a smaller component of Sociology’s operations, but between 2012 and 2015, leadership of both Anthropology and Sociology working together realized one success after another and now they have new and popular major attracting students in Sciences and Engineering.
Dr. Gallant earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. The President of IAOTP, Stephanie Cirami, stated “Choosing Dr. Gallant for this award was an easy decision for our panel to make. She is an exceptional Professor who is enthusiastic about Sociology. Her knowledge and effective teaching skills have added great vibrancy and promise to the education of her students. We are thrilled to be able to honor her in this way and cannot wait to call her name on stage this December at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.”
Looking back across the course of her professional career, Dr. Gallant has numerous cherished accomplishments. Her remarkable leadership and commitment to her profession has led to her selection for the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Top Professionals. In 2019, Dr. Gallant was honored as Top Associate Professor of the Year in Sociology, she was featured in an article for TIP (Top Industry Professionals) Magazine, and was honored at IAOTP’s Annual Awards Gala in Las Vegas at the Bellagio Hotel. In the spring of 2018, she was featured on the famous Reuters Billboard in Times Square NY and was selected as Woman of the Month by P.O.W.E.R. magazine. She received the Excellence in Scholarship Award presented by Rowan University and has twice won Rowan University’s prestigious Wall of Fame Award. Her professional affiliations include the Eastern Sociological Association and the American Sociological Association.
Dr. Gallant believes success is rarely due to personal merit alone; besides what ingenuity, perseverance and resilience add to individual achievement, a larger debt is owed to our connections to others, along with the love of family, friends, teachers and mentors. She likes “ordinary” joys; she wants to write, do research and teach. Whenever possible she listens to National Public Radio, J.S. Bach cantatas and attends with great interest the frolicking of birds and bunnies in her back garden. She asks us to remember a quote from Anne (Annalies Marie) Frank (June 12, 1929) who perished at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, February/March, 1945:
“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power but in character and goodness.” –Anne Frank
For more information on Dr. Gallant please visit: www.iaotp.com
View her Video Biography:
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